I said I hadn’t heard anything to the contrary. Mum will be so pleased, she said, she was worried that Bård’s children wouldn’t show up.
He’s using the children, she said again. It’s the worst thing you can do, using the children! Mum is terrified of losing contact with Bård’s children. Mum has always had such a good relationship with them, and now it might be ruined all because of him.
Cautiously I ventured that they might genuinely be sad that the cabins had been transferred to her and Åsa; it was the first time I hinted that I didn’t buy her version wholeheartedly. She fell silent. Then she said that if this really was just about the valuations, they could always get new ones. Perhaps it was a silly way to have gone about it, she said. Perhaps the valuations were a little low, she said. Perhaps we should have asked for two quotes, but we didn’t think that far ahead.
I opened a bottle of red wine. When I had drunk it, I felt calmer and I took the dog for another walk. It was still snowing, big heavy flakes that melted on my face and soon I was wet through and through. The sky was big and the stars shone with an unreal intensity or maybe it was just the wine. I walked back, I had made up my mind.
I couldn’t find Bård’s number online so I called Astrid. She said she didn’t have it either. But you only spoke to him yesterday? Åsa has it, she said, I asked if she would call Åsa and then call me back, it was late, she said reluctantly, and then it turned out that she had it after all.
When I said my name, Bergljot, he fell silent. Then he said that he had thought about me a lot recently, and it was my turn to fall silent. Then I told him about my conversations with Astrid and he told me how he saw the situation. He seemed sad, I thought. He mentioned a dystopian novel I had once sent him about the decline of a family I thought resembled ours, about a childhood that resembled ours.
It had been like that, he said.
My heart was racing as I drove home from Klara’s. Had she told me that she was in love with a married man because she had worked out that I was too? Could she tell from looking? Did anyone else know? I was married to a nice and decent man and I had three young children with him. And yet I was in love with another, a married man. It was monstrous, it was horrible, what should I do, it was impossible, I was impossible. I didn’t have a job, no regular income, but three small children and a nice and affluent man and was passionately in love with another, it was terrible, shameful, unforgivable, how could I, what was wrong with me for me to do something like that?
Klara rang the following week; I wouldn’t have picked up the phone if I had known it was her. She asked if I would visit her again, she had bought another bookcase she couldn’t assemble. I didn’t want to, I went there and assembled the bookcase and told her about the married man. She had sensed as much, she said. She could feel things like that, she said and patted my cheek and I started to cry, what was I going to do?
What I was experiencing, I came to realise once I started to understand my life, was that a moment of insight was approaching like the tremors that precede an earthquake, and like an animal I could sense it before it happened. I was filled with dread and I trembled at the painful dawning of a truth which would rip me to pieces, perhaps I was working subconsciously to advance it, to get it over with, given that it was inevitable.
December and fog right down to the ground. Yesterday’s snow had melted, there was slush and black puddles on lawns and roads, and it was cold both outside and in because my heating was broken.
I should have been editing theatre reviews and writing the editorial for the next issue of On Stage, but I didn’t. Instead I made a Thermos flask of tea, got dressed in woollens and wellies and my heavy parka with the hood, it’s always a good idea to be dressed properly. I went to the forest where no one ever came at this time of the day, sat down on a fallen tree trunk and let the dog run free. Sometimes I would see deer here, in the spring and summer, and birds and squirrels and frogs, but today it was just us. Fido sniffed and wagged her tail, jumped over branches and stones, blissfully ignorant of inheritance and childhood. Should I write in an ironic style about The Journey to the Christmas Star and The Nutcracker, about the lovely family shows that theatres staged at Christmas? No, that would be facile; I could feel a lump in my throat.
It grew dark so we went home, I lit a fire, opened a bottle of red wine and took out my editorial notes. I had only just got down to work when Bård emailed me to say that it had been good to talk though the circumstances could have been happier. Would I like to have lunch soon?
I agree and yes, please, I replied.
As soon as I had pressed ‘send’, Astrid called, wondering if I had spoken to Bård. I said I was meeting him next week. I got the impression that that worried her.
I had closed down my Mac and was getting ready to go to bed when Klara rang to tell me that Rolf Sandberg had died.
Rolf Sandberg. Mum’s great extramarital love. A professor at the teacher training college where Mum had been a mature student. The man Mum had fallen head over heels in love with, the man Mum had started an affair with although he also was married. Mum’s passionate love affair with Rolf Sandberg lasted several years until Dad found the beginning of a love letter from Mum under an embroidered cloth on a chest of drawers on Hvaler. Perhaps she intended him to find it. Perhaps Mum wanted Dad to know about the affair, perhaps she thought that if Dad found out, he would divorce her and she could marry Rolf Sandberg. But Dad didn’t react as she had hoped, but as he always did, with rage and violence, and Rolf Sandberg didn’t react as Mum had hoped either. When she told him that Dad had found the letter, he replied that one divorce was better than two. Mum locked herself in a room with pills and alcohol, Dad kicked down the door, called an ambulance and Mum was taken to Fredrikstad Hospital and had her stomach pumped.
Mum tried living on her own, but it wasn’t a success. Dad rented a flat for her, but after a week and a half she was back with him, but on his terms. However, she never stopped seeing Rolf Sandberg, and I guess she never stopped loving him either. She told me this. She didn’t tell Astrid or Åsa because they would have been horrified to discover that she still was in touch with Rolf Sandberg, and they would have told Dad and sided with him against her. Mum knew that I wouldn’t be outraged on Dad’s behalf or tell him anything. That was the difference between Astrid and Åsa and me, our relationship with Dad.
Then I cut all contact with my family and heard nothing more of Rolf Sandberg, but I’m convinced that for years Mum kept hoping that the two of them would end up together. When his wife died, I was almost sure that Mum wanted Dad dead so that she could move in with Rolf Sandberg. Then Rolf Sandberg died and Mum took an overdose when she heard that he was on his deathbed—possibly because she realised that her dream had shattered.
I called Astrid though it was past midnight and told her that Rolf Sandberg had died and that Mum’s overdose probably had nothing to do with Bård’s text message, but everything to do with Rolf Sandberg’s death. She began to get nervous, I could hear it.
I wrote to Bård to tell him that Rolf Sandberg had died, and that Mum’s overdose was probably to do with his death rather than the text message Bård had sent her.
Klara and I both loved married men who wouldn’t get divorced, who didn’t want us, who wanted sex with us in hotel rooms, whom we couldn’t bear to tear ourselves away from, and we were miserable. Klara lived on her own, it had its downsides, I lived with my husband and three children, that too had its downsides. I had married and had children young in order to be a mother and not a daughter any more, I came to realise once I started to understand my life; now I was deceiving my husband and my children, and I was ashamed. Klara was deceiving no one, but had no money and worked night shifts as a waitress at Renna Bar to make ends meet. My husband earned plenty of money so I was able to study without having to take out a student loan, I was a cheat and a parasite. I visited Klara whenever I could and drank with her friends from the bar who were mentally unstable and alcoholic, intelligent, broke and wretched, misfits and outsiders. Strange, marginal existences with no survival skills, always knocking on Klara’s door, as did I, eager to mix with